Airbnb gets subpoena demand for data on all 15,000 NYC-area hosts

“A drunk European for one week is one thing”—but not for 40 weeks a year.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has sent subpoenas to the home-renting company Airbnb, demanding data on all 15,000 users who have rented out their apartments or homes in that city. The city insists it isn't going after the casual renter—it wants to find landlords who may have removed apartments from the rental market altogether and are essentially running hotels off the Airbnb site, a violation of a 2010 law that makes it illegal to rent an apartment for fewer than thirty days.

But by collecting information on 15,000 users, Airbnb says Schneiderman is going way too far. The company has 225,000 users in New York City in total, meaning fewer than seven percent of those users are hosts.

“Even the politicians who wrote the original law agree it was never designed to target regular people who occasionally share their homes,” the company told the New York Daily News. “We are concerned that this is an unreasonably broad government demand for user data, and we remain committed to protecting our users' privacy."

The AG's office wouldn't comment, but an anonymous law enforcement source told the Daily News that Airbnb hasn't been helpful.

"[T]hey certainly haven't been cooperating with the investigation, despite their public promises to go after the guys the state is after," said the source.

The source also confirmed the real target is landlords doing long-term illegal rentals. Those become especially problematic when there's an obnoxious tenant.

“A drunk European for one week is one thing,” the source said. “If you have to live with it 40 weeks a year, that’s a big difference.”

Airbnb has seen more legal clashes in New York's highly regulated housing market than in any other US city. New Yorkers actually have certain legal rights to sublet their apartments, which is not a guaranteed tenant right in most cities. However, those subletting laws don't apply to stays of fewer than 30 days, which is the majority of Airbnb use.

The subpoenas come just a week after Airbnb won a hard-fought case on appeal. In May, New York Airbnb host Nigel Warren was fined $2,400 for hosting a visitor from Russia for three nights. However, last week an appeals court ruled that Warren's rental was legal because his roommate was there at the time.